THE JOURNALS OF AYN RAND

ARI is to be commended for publishing this material, which gives us a still clearer view of how Ayn Rand's thinking developed and how she went about her work. Editor David Harriman has included about three fourths of her "working journals"; he omits her personal notes, which are reserved to a forthcoming authorized biography. He offers little editorial commentary; too little, perhaps. It would have been helpful at points to have more information about the people and situations Rand refers to.

Most of this material consists of Rand's work plans for her novels. Also included is her rough draft for *The Moral Basis of Individualism*, her notes for a movie scenario about the Manhattan Project, "Screen Guide for Americans," and notes for her last, unwritten novel, *To Lorne Dieterling*. Unfortunately, there are no notes about her plays.

One is immediately struck by the amount of conceptual work that Rand put into her novels, particularly *Atlas Shrugged*. When she described Hank Rearden's ordeal in the quest for Rearden Metal--"driving himself through the wringing torture of: 'not good enough . . . still not good enough . . .'"--she knew what she was talking about! To read these notes is an education in how to organize a novel, how to portray characters based on psycho-epistemology, how to use plot events to illustrate ideas.

The philosophical notes which appear throughout give additional perspective on Rand's intellectual development. The most striking fact is the strong Nietzschean element in Rand's early work. This is--finally--acknowledged by Leonard Peikoff in his Foreword. As I pointed out in *The Ideas of Ayn Rand*, the influence of Nietzsche was reflected in Rand's early fiction by a malevolent view of society and a pessimistic outlook; this gradually moderated as Rand gradually dropped Nietzsche's viewpoint in her later career. In her pre-*We the Living* journals we see a confirming example. Here we find the notes for an unwritten novel, *The Little Street* (1928). It is distinctly Nietzschean in viewpoint, the story of a "superior" criminal who murders a lesser man by whom he has been "unjustly hurt and deeply insulted." It is also relentlessly negative, a bitter and cynical indictment of society. It ends with the "hero" killed by a lynch mob, lying dead in a gutter.

Following the notes for *The Little Street*, Rand appended an extraordinary personal self-criticism (p. 48). "From now on--no thought whatever about yourself, only about your work. You don't exist. You are only a writing engine." "*Stop admiring yourself--you are nothing yet.*" "Try to forget yourself--to forget all high ideas, ambitions, supermen and so on. . . . Try to be calm, balanced, indifferent, normal, and not enthusiastic, passionate, excited, ecstatic, flaming, tense." Both the notes for the novel, and the self-criticism, suggest that at this point in her life Rand may have undergone some profound emotional crisis.

In her first philosophical journal (1934) we see Rand coming up with the idea that power, achieved by pandering to the masses, is actually slavery to those same masses. This is the key to her characterization of Gail Wynand, of course. But it also is the key to her rejection of Nietzsche and her new conception of egoism. Ironically, Rand apparently took a long time to realize what she had accomplished. As late as 1943, there are hints that Rand was still thinking of her egoism as comparable to that of Nietzsche or even Stirner (!). (See the *Letters*, pp. 175 and 176.)

There is only a limited amount of new philosophical material in the *Journals*. Most of the philosophical analysis consists of early or tentative formulations of ideas that Rand later published. A few short passages, however, raise stimulating questions. Rand's 1955 notes on psychology and psycho-epistemology, for instance, illuminate the origins of "Objectivist psychotherapy (pp. 668-677).

Particularly intriguing is a 1946 note in which Rand toys with metaphysical dualism (p. 466):

It is possible that there was a sharp break, that the rational faculty was like a spark, added to the animal who was ready for it--and this would be actually like a soul entering a body. Or it might be that there is a metaphysical mistake in considering animals as pure matter. There is, scientifically, a most profound break between the living and the non-living. Now *life* may be the spirit; the animals may be the forms of spirit and matter, in which matter predominates; man may be the highest form, the crown and final goal of the universe, the form of spirit and matter in which the spirit predominates and triumphs. (If there's any value in "feelings" and "hunches"--God! how I feel that *this* is true!)

In sum, the *Journals* will be of greatest interest to specialists who want to understand the developmental details behind Rand's published work. But many of her readers will value this book for its window on the workings of a great mind.

Ron Merrill